BOOST YOUR BRANDING WITH FREE SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING TOOLS FOR BUSINESS
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing is a form of digital marketing that helps businesses and organizations to connect with their target customers by publishing texts, images, videos, and other content. It is a platform where you can build your brand’s image and achieve your branding and marketing goals. You can also announce your new product/services and run social media advertisements. There are many social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Snapchat. To benefit from any of these Social Media platforms, it is important to first have your presence on these networks. You can then spread your brand awareness which further drives traffic on your website and engages your target customers.
Tools for Social Media Marketing
There are awesome Social Media Marketing tools available to help social media marketers perform their job well. The advantage of using these tools is that they save time, streamline your work, and reach the right audience. Each tool available is unique in its own way, it is very important to choose and use the right tool for your particular business. To be on the top of your game you cannot just depend on Facebook and ignore other platforms, you never know what opportunities might be waiting for you elsewhere. Here is a list of few very good tools out there for small-medium sized business.
Buffer
Purpose- A tool that supports multiple social networks, helps you schedule post, engage your clients, and analyze your performance.
Cost: Unlimited Free plan/ Paid Plans(Pro, Premium and Business)
Description: Buffers a well designed and one of the most popular social Media Marketing tool which supports multiple social networks in a single place. It helps to get meaningful engagements and results on Social Media. Buffer supports Twitter and multiple Twitter accounts, Facebook profiles and Facebook pages, personal and company’s LinkedIn profile, and Pinterest. You simply need to log in with one of your existing accounts and you can bring all your social media accounts in one dashboard. You can schedule posts and monitor engagement on any of these social networks. Buffer also analyses how each of your status updates performed.
Buffer has both paid and free plans. The free plan is an unlimited trial but there are limitations in that, you can only connect to one profile per social platform. So, it is better to choose from their paid plans (Pro, Premium, and Business) depending on the need of your business.
Hootsuite
Purpose: A tool that connects up to 35 social networks, help you schedule posts, manage team members, and analyze your performance.
Cost: Free plan/ Paid plans
Description: Hootsuite is the most widely used Social Media Marketing tool, currently used by almost around 15 million people. This tool connects up to 35 social networks and can schedule posts from a single platform. It covers mostly all aspects of a social media marketer. With this tool, you are able to manage your multiple tasks like post cool content, managing team members, and measuring ROI.
It is very important to schedule your posts at the right time, Hootsuite gives us an option to find the best time when the post should be published and publish at exactly that time. This tool monitors multiple accounts and keeps a track of all the interactions on social media related to your business. On Hootsuite you have an option to analyze all the accounts that are logged in, handles multiple queries from customers on a single dashboard, hence helping the marketer manage things on one platform. These features make the working of social media marketers efficient and easy.
Hootsuite has both options, free and paid. To be able to make use of all features of this tool, you will have to pay the cost for it. You can choose from different plans they offer depending on the kind of usage your business demands.
Sprout Social
Purpose: Social Sprout is a tool that makes it easy to manage multiple social profiles along with effective Customer Relationship Management features.
Cost: Paid plans(Pro, Premium, and Business)
Description: Do you want to understand and reach your target clients, engage your customers, and analyze the performance? Then Sprout social is worth a look. Sprout Social is a paid social marketing management that connects multiple social media tools into one platform. It is a one-stop location where you can do almost everything from publishing your posts, scheduling, managing, and editing posts to analyzing them. Sprout Social supports Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+.
Sprout Social specialises in providing customer relationship management features. This tool generates reports so great that the social media marketer do not have to edit them and can send it to their customers right away. Some of the reports included are
- Engagement Report
- Sent messages Report
- Twitter Report
- Facebook Report
- Instagram Report
Later
You can view all the messages at one spot and track all the discussions about your business across different social media platforms. It comes with a visual calendar that shows everything clearly if there is more content on a particular day and nothing on the other. This is the best tool for companies with a large number of employees, everyone gets live updates on all the activities. Hence, it avoids any overlapping of actions.
Purpose: Later focuses on marketing and managing your profile and posts on Instagram
Cost: Paid plans(Pro, Premium, and Business)
Description: Is Instagram your first option for marketing your brand or business? Well, you must have a look at Later then. Later is a social media tool that focuses only on Instagram. You can drag and drop your posts to schedule them on their famous visual calendar. Later has your account safe, it is an Instagram partner and used the Instagram profile API. Later also keeps your content safe, so you can import all the content for you Instagram from various locations like iCloud, phone, or Dropbox. Multiple Instagram accounts can be managed and you save the data separately too. Before you post anything with Later, you can always see the preview of your post. Later tracks the likes, followers, and clicks for you to know what’s doing well and what’s not. Later links your posts to pages and drives your sales by helping your followers find your product.
MavSocial
Later has a free plan as a well-Paid plan option. The free plan has limitations of posting just 30 posts per social platform. There are different paid plans, Plus for solopreneurs, Premium for small business, a starter for growing companies, and brand for agencies and large teams. You can choose the plan as per your business needs.
Purpose: MavSocial is a tool that helps in visual marketing, schedule posts, and engages your customers.
Cost: Paid plans(Advanced, Pro, Business, Enterprise, )
Description: MavSocial is a simple Social Media Marketing tool that helps marketers curate content, schedule posts, engage with customers, build reports, and collaborate with team members. This is one of the only social media marketing tools which makes visual marketing easier. MavSocial supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and WeChat.
Oktopost
This platform allows access to many free stock images, tracks social media campaigns, responds to all comments and messages, and analyses trends and engage with it. It also supports Twitter and Facebook ads. MavSocial has only paid plan options, Advanced for solopreneurs, bloggers, and small enterprises, Pro for small-medium sized businesses, Business for small to medium-sized digital agencies and enterprises for brands and agencies who need a large number of users and social profiles. You can choose your plan according to the nature of your business.
Purpose: This tool makes it easy for B2B marketers to quantify and helps to establish the true impact of social media based on B2B goals.
Cost: Paid plans
Description: Oktoposts is a social media management tool that is designed for B2B enterprise companies. B2B Marketers can schedule posts, track performances, and integrate social data with their entire marketing environment. It supports sharing with Facebook profiles and pages, Twitter, LinkedIn profiles, pages and groups, and Google + pages.
With Oktopost you can create a queue of content to be shared over a period of time, it monitors all the comments through inbox and helps to respond to it. It automatically adds tracking codes to the campaigns you create which are then visible within Google Analytics and shows all the results. It also enables you to share content as you are browsing the web. It is very simple to work on Oktopost, all you have to do is sign-in on your social media profile and connect to the account. You can then add team members and be ready to manage your social profiles.
Canva
It is a Paid Social Media Tool and you will have to get in touch with the company to know the different plans they offer.
Purpose: Canva helps to create visual content for posting on social media platforms.
Cost: Paid plans
Description: Looking for an easy social media graphic tool to create pleasing designs? Check this out!! Creating visual content can be time consuming and inefficient, don’t worry, Canva helps you create beautiful content for your pages in no time. Canva helps to create:
- Facebook Cover Photos: Canva has thousands of well designed Facebook cover templates available which you can customize for your own business. The Facebook cover picture is the first image any person checking your profile sees, it tells the brand personality and a good Facebook cover can attract more audiences. You can pick one from their range of templates and make your page look amazing.
- Pinterest graphics: Canva has a wide variety of Pinterest graphics available in different shapes and sizes. You can pick one from their library and make you can make your website hub of wonderful posts.
- Reviews: Do you want to design reviews and make them look interesting? You can simply choose an existing template and write the review sent by your customers. It is very helpful to gain trust in potential clients by posting such reviews. You can simply post these reviews on your social media.
- Instagram Stories: Have you ever engaged yourself with your customers on Instagram stories? If not, check the templates Canva offers to make your Instagram stories look polished and professional. And if you have already been posting Instagram stories, trust us and check Canva, it saves a hell of your time.
- Branded Images: Canva helps to create branding images by just drag and drop. It makes the branding images look very sleek and using this feature saves time.
Important Tips For Social Media Marketing
Are you wondering how to choose a social media marketing tool for your business? Well, Earlier Social Media Marketing was only about posting your content to drive sales but now it’s much more. It helps in promotion, analyzing, and knowing your clients more closely. If you use the right type of Social Media Marketing your brand can grow and get good results but if you make a mistake in choosing the right tool your business can be in a bad spot. If you have already made your account on one of the social media or if you are still planning to, keep these things in mind:
- Strategy
The most important thing that needs to be done is “know your brand’s strategy”. You should have a goal of how to use social medial Marketing tools, whether you want to use it for advertisement, for brand awareness, or for increasing sales. After figuring that out, you will be able to finalize which social media platform you want to focus on. We have mentioned a few of the social media platforms above, either you can choose from these or you can choose smaller scale platforms such as Tumblr, WhatsApp. Depending on the nature of your business you can decide what kind of content you want to publish if you want to publish videos or images or something more creative.
- Planning
A huge number of people are active on various social media platforms every day. If you are present on any of the social media platforms it is a great opportunity for your business to grow as you can get in touch with so many people just through your social media account. You should plan well in advance what kind of content you should post that will attract clients to your brand or business. It is very important to post great content so that you can attract clients and maximize your reach. You can publish an image, video, or blog related to your business. You can take the help of one of the tools mentioned above to reach the right audience.
- Listening and Engagement
When your business will grow, the discussions related to it will also increase. It is very important to know what people are commenting on your product. If it is positive you can be happy about your hard work but if it is negative you will want to improve before it is too bad. You can manually keep a track of comments on your various social media websites but it is not so efficient. Well, you can use one of the social media tools and you will have all the posts related to your business right in front of you, even the ones who did not tag you.
- Analytics
Are you wondering how did your recent post perform? How many people did your post reach? How many people wrote a positive comment? You can get basic information easily from any social media platforms but if you are looking for in-depth analysis you will have to choose one of the social media marketing tools mentioned above. With the help of these tools, you can take future decisions and improve in the fields where it’s required.
- Advertising
Advertising needs a high budget, so once your business is established and can afford it, you can consider this area for social media marketing. These days advertising tools are so great that you can choose whom to exactly show your ad to in terms of age group, gender, interests, area, and more. When you are running multiple social media advertisements, social marketing tools can help you optimize your ad.
We, at Maple, have a team of dedicated digital marketers and IT professionals who stay up-to-date with the latest trends. We strive to provide you the best online marketing services by blending technology, skills, and understanding of your business. We assure honest audits and analysis followed by tailor-made promotion strategies.
We carefully plan online marketing campaigns is based on a deep understanding of your products/services and target audience. Our approach to creating a converting digital marketing strategy involves many steps but a single purpose, your growth. We start by evaluating your present situation, which is followed by building a robust strategy while putting to use available technologies and knowledge. A regular analysis and improvement process is what keeps it running and bringing in desired results
You can count on us for result oriented, reliable, cost-effective, and customized marketing solutions.
This article is originally published at Free social media marketing tools for business